Various systems have been suggested in the past to manage access to liquids in containers, for instance bottles with an alcoholic beverage. These systems are generally designed to control who is authorized to pour a quantity of liquid from a given bottle and/or to meter the quantity of liquid being poured. Some systems can also record each transaction in a database. These systems are useful to bar owners for accounting all servings being made. Among other things, it makes it very difficult for an employee to serve unauthorized free or generous drinks to friends or preferred customers.
Dispensing systems often include spouts mounted on bottles, where each spout has an internal spring-biased valve that can be opened using an electromagnetic field generated therein or by a handheld device positioned on the spout. The valve normally closes the fluid passage inside the spout. The electromagnetic field must create a force sufficient to open the fluid passage for a given time while the bottle is upside-down, after which the spout is closed once again. See for instance U.S. Pat. No. 3,920,149 (Fortino et al.) issued 18 Nov. 1975.
Many of the proposed arrangements use a hard-wired connection to the handheld device for the supply of the electrical power required to generate the electromagnetic field. Other arrangements, such as the one disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,036,055 (Mogadam et al.) issued 14 Mar. 2000, suggest using a handheld device running on battery power.
Existing arrangements involving a hard-wired connection with the handheld device are not per se portable because they can only be used within the range permitted by the length of the electric wire and the available locations where the electric wire can be plugged in. Still, when the electrical energy comes from an external power source using a hard-wired connection, the electrical energy consumption within the handheld device is not necessarily a prime interest. However, minimizing the electrical energy consumption is highly desirable when using a battery power pack. Existing devices are relatively limited in autonomy because the electromagnetic field to move the valve during each serving requires a lot of electrical energy from the battery power pack. This may force a barman to recharge the battery power pack during a same shift or to use more than one handheld device, for instance. Increasing the battery capacity is a possible solution but this has an adverse impact on at least one among costs, weight and size of the battery power pack. Other factors can also play a role, such as the maximum current and the operating temperature, to name just a few. For instance, minimizing the size of the coil in the handheld device will generally require using a higher electrical current from the battery power pack. The higher electrical current could then lead to issues related to overheating.
Accordingly, there is still room for many improvements in this area of technology.